The resulting effect was bare but beautiful. There were a great many books, a few oil-portraits, mahogany sideboards and tables and four-poster beds, candles in sconces and in branched candlesticks. They were married in April, and when we went down in June poppies were blowing in the wide grass spaces, and honeysuckle rioting over the low stone walls. I think we all felt as if we had passed through purgatory and had entered heaven. I know I did, because this was the land of thing of which I had dreamed, and there had been a time when I, too, had wanted to write.
The room in which Jimmie wrote was in a little detached house, which had once been the office of his doctor grandfather. He had his typewriter out there, and a big desk, and from the window in front of his desk he could look out on green slopes and the distant blue of mountain ridges.
We envied him and told him so.
"Well, I don't know," Jimmie said. "Of course I'll get a lot of work done. But I'll miss your darling old heads bending over the other desks."
"You couldn't work, Jimmie," Elise reminded him, "with other people in the room."
"Perhaps not. Did I tell you old dears that I am going to write a play?"
That was, it seems, what Elise had had in mind for him from the beginning—a great play!
10
